Content sharing services have been developed as a technique to provide an online marketplace for creative professionals to sell content, such as images. A creative professional, for instance, may capture or create images that are exposed via the content sharing services to potential customers such as marketing professionals, casual users, and so on. For example, a creative professional may capture an image of a coworkers conversing next to a watercooler. The image is then uploaded and tagged for availability as part of the content sharing service such that a marketing professional performing a search for “office” and “watercooler” may locate the image. The content sharing service also includes functionality to make the image available for licensing in response to payment of a fee, e.g., as part of a subscription service, pay per use, and so forth.
In conventional digital online marketplaces, however, a particular image desired by a marketing professional may not be available. Therefore, in order to obtain the image the marketing professional is then forced to commission a creative professional to create the image or settle for a similar image, which may take time and is expensive and thus could force the marketing professional to miss or delay in addressing an opportunity for a marketing campaign. Similarly, in conventional services creative professionals are not made aware of which images are desired by users of the content sharing service absent such commissions and as such are forced to guess which image are likely to be purchased by the users. This results in a divide between the creative professionals that create the images and the consumers of the images, which is both inefficient and frustrating to both entities.